


in which I ramble and all blood is metaphorical

by Sonora



Category: Original Work
Genre: I'm sorry I'm even using that OC tag but the system makes you, and you've already nuked all your other social media accounts, blogging trash I swear, fuck I don't even know, rambling bullshit because this is what I do, this is what happens when you need to say some shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 14:39:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15910302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: This is what happens when you delete your Livejournal





	in which I ramble and all blood is metaphorical

**Author's Note:**

> Don't they delete things like this? They probably do. Maybe that's for the best. I don't even know, guys, I don't even know. this is wht happens when I'm too tired and too uninspired to come up with a cohesive narrative, but I still need to say something.

Over the years, my music playlists have a tendency to shift. I listen to a certain set of songs for a period of time, then move to another. Some music bridges my entire adult life - VNV Nation, for example - while other pieces are rooted in a very specific time and place of my life. That music, those songs, have this wonderful ability to take me back to those moments, those feelings. 

I had one of those moments last Sunday, driving around to nowhere in particular. My iPod does this sometimes, pulling up random songs from my library. It spooled up one of those songs that I listened to ad nauseam during a very specific time of my life. It got me thinking about where I was back then and where I am now and I’ll be honest, I got emotional about it.

It all ties back to this weird little corner of the Internet we inhabit. For good or for bad, a big chunk of my adult life ties back into this place. And I’m at the point where I just can’t be here much anymore, if at all, and I guess I feel the need to talk about that. 

It’s been quite a ride. And everyone should know at this point that I hate leaving loose ends in stories. 

For as much time as I’ve spent here, I don’t ascribe myself any particular importance in the wider fanfiction community. I had my fun in a few minor fandoms, met some wonderful people, but it’s not like anybody’s ever printed out one of my fanfics and had it professionally bound and given to somebody for Christmas (like my sister-in-law’s college roommate once did for her). I am not one of the well-known writers for the MCU or Star Wars or whatever the fuck is popular these days. But IDK, I just need to talk I guess. I always did over explain things.

I got into fan fiction when I was sixteen. Because when I was sixteen, something happened to me and my family that… I don’t have words for it. It was a hate crime, motivated by rage over bullshit issues. I am not going to get into details here - the police report and subsequent local reporting can no doubt be found online, and this is not about doxxing myself - but one of the outcomes of this was our dog dying. And that was the most _minor_ thing that happened.

I as a fucking mess. I spent most of my school years being horribly bullied anyway - was on the verge of suicide several times middle school - but this was so much worse. My classmates thought it was hilarious, my friends turned it into a joke (and yes, these fuckers knew about my dog), and my parents decided to not send me to counseling because it would have destroyed my chances of going to a service academy. The event itself was hideously scarring, and while I’m not going to make claims of having PTSD from it, I had nightmares and flashbacks for almost a decade after. But immediately surrounding it, I was in a tremendous amount of emotional pain.

My grandmother moved in with us, though, which meant I finally got a computer in my room. Which meant that somehow, for some reason, I found fan fiction. 

For those of you who were in elementary school when the Twin Towers came down, before social media gave us things like Tumblr, it was harder to access this stuff back then. In the early 2000s, we were past the mail ‘zines and the Geocities web-rings, but it was still kind of tough to find fanfiction. You had to know where to go, and I think the posting was a lot more difficult. Stuff was stovepiped, and in some cases, age-protected. Took me a while, but I found it.

I was really into Highlander at the time, so that’s what I got into. I needed something to hide in, and damn, did that fandom deliver. Oh, and did I mention there is a lot of really bloody-gross, violent, non-con, murder in that fandom? Or at least, there used to be. There was a lot less judgement back then. We hadn’t invented SJWs yet - nobody around to yell at you when you had Kronos string Methos up and fuck him up. Nobody to tell you that slashfic is gay activism, or an act of feminist socialist protest against the patriarchy (which was literally the thesis of some graduate paper one of my Tony/Steve stories got quoted in). Just plenty of shit to make you forget what’s in those crime scene photos that your dad has locked up in the family safe.

Years later, a psychologist would tell me that this is what I did instead of cutting. 

Anyway. 

I went off to Basic - possibly with PTSD - and nothing about that four years went the way I wanted it to. This, again, is not something I’m going to get into detail about. Suffice it to say, I have actively avoided talking to any of my classmates. Somebody, last year, went out of their way to reach out and say hello when we ran into each other at an event. I had to go cry in the bathroom. The Academy was a mindfuck of an experience, one that really stripped me of any pride I might have been able to take in graduating from the place (or much of anything else in my military career), but I got through it.

This is where I should probably mention the sexual assault.

And the move to Japan. 

And all the shit that happened to me over there.

And the shit I dealt with after I got back to the States.

And how insanely painful getting out of the military was for me.

And man I thought I was going to marry, who I ended up having to throw out of my apartment and change the locks behind his back because there didn’t seem to be any other way of getting him out without issues. (For the record, there’s part of me that will always love you, if you’re reading this, but it wasn’t right for either of us, and I think you know that).

But I’ve written enough about all that. I wrote about it a lot in my stories. I wrote about everything in my stories. I don’t want to write about it anymore, and that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Because somehow this all goes back to what happened when I was sixteen; in a very real way, this site holds the scar patterns I’ve cut into myself over the years, and that doesn’t feel good. Because some of these stories I've written - not all, of course, but some - aren't about Face or Raleigh or Chuck or Tony or Steve at all. 

I know we all do that. I think I just did too much of it sometimes.

I want to be honest about this too, because I think it’s important. I realized last year I had completely lost my ability to enjoy sex. Like, there was absolutely no physical input that made me feel _anything_. According to some of the reading I did, you can develop a problem called “disassociation” from too much… well, too much of this. I’m not saying that anybody else can or has or does or should have this problem, but I did. I don’t doubt that some of the other experiences I’ve had contributed to the problem too. 

But I wanted to get married. Have kids. Be a mom. Give the guy I love what he needs. Feel _loved_. Stop living in my own fucking head like an agoraphobic afraid to step outside. Which meant I had to stop retreating into fantasy and pushing away from myself when something intense was happening. 

I’m tired of cutting open the scars on my arms and watching myself bleed out into my keyboard. 

Writing helps me get it out, you see, but that doesn’t mean it makes it go away. There is value in neural-feedback, or whatever they call it, but this is not a night where I feel like going easy on myself. I need to write different stories. I need to make different choices.

This is not really where I imagined myself, back when I was sixteen, or nineteen, or twenty-four. 

I don’t think anything in life is ever the way we want it to be. I don’t think we can fully determine the path we’ll walk. I think our choices define us, but they don’t necessarily determine our greater reality. Who knows, who really knows, what’s in somebody else’s heart? What they’re going to choose to do, and how do they know what impact their choices with have on others? I don’t know why my friends, in high school, decided to do what they did to me. I don’t know why one of my classmates decided to rape me, or why I couldn’t find it in me to ask for help. I don’t know why my fiancee decided to like my online dating profile and ask me out for coffee. 

Sometimes, I don’t know why I’ve written any of what I’ve written here. 

(You have no idea how terrible I feel sometimes about some of the Pacific Rim stuff, especially the Pacific Rim stuff. There is a very large, heavy, thick wall that I keep up in my brain between "reality" and "fanfic world", and pushing myself back out into the real world has made that very difficult to maintain. Just another reason I can't really be here right now.)

I’m incredibly grateful for it at the same time. Life shows us who we are. And here in fandom, I’ve met some lovely people and had a lot of fun. With some of the things I’ve been through, I don’t think I had any option but to go somewhere else and hide away from it. 

I know people like my stuff, and I don’t think it would be fair to take it down, take it away. Besides, taking it down doesn’t erase the timeline; it doesn’t unmake anything. I just hope I haven’t hurt anybody with it, and if I have, I profusely apologize. 

I still have stories. I have so many stories. I need to be able to write without the pain under it all. I need to know I can hold up, write, dream, without it. 

Tonight though, I’ve got to comb back through eighteen years of music and see if there’s anything I like that we can use for our first dance. I’m not finding anything, and I don’t know what that says about me as a person. So I’m going to get some wine and get going on that again. 

If you hear about somebody using Shiny Toy Gun’s “Turned to Real Life” or VNV Nation’s “Gratitude” as a first dance, it might be me.


End file.
